Deaths

U.S. & Latin America - Deaths

August 23, 2001

SIR FRED HOYLE, 86, astronomer: Hoyle, who coined the term "big bang" but never accepted that theory for the origin of the universe, died Monday in London. Hoyle became Britain's best-known astronomer in 1950 with his broadcast lectures on "The Nature of the Universe." He recalled using big bang for the first time in the last of those talks. Working with Hermann Bondi and Thomas Gold, Hoyle proposed a steady-state theory in the 1940s, arguing that the universe developed in a process of continuous growth. Observations by radio astronomy in the 1950s demonstrated that the universe was expanding faster than Hoyle's theory predicted, giving credence to the view that it began in an explosion of incredibly dense matter.